Born in Pittsburgh, Busa came from a family of artists including his father, who worked as a church muralist. Busa studied at the Carnegie Institute before traveling to New York to study at the Art Students League with Thomas Hart Benton in the same class as Jackson Pollock. Through his friend Arshile Gorky, he came into contact with Stuart Davis, who deeply influenced the young Busa. This mural size work, from the mid-sixties, reflects the influence of hard-edge color field painting, popular among New York School artists in the late 1950s and 1960s.